Comment 12 for bug 161058

Just confirmed on 8.10 as well. It seems things have gotten slightly better.

I wrote a simple ~/.fonts.conf:

<fontconfig>
   <match target="font">
      <test name="family"><string>DejaVu Sans Mono</string></test>
      <edit name="hintstyle"><const>hintfull</const></edit>
   </match>
</fontconfig>

fc-match -v "DejaVu Sans Mono" will always return me a result that is consistent with my fonts.conf.

In Intrepid, the above setting *seems* to work as long as you never actually run the gnome appearance panel and manually change the hint settings. Once you do that, then all the settings get overridden again (even if I restart apps [i've been testing with gedit])